Read the full article, including a summary of the USADA charges, a look at the riders who might inherit the seven jerseys, and three exploits that prove he was a champion regardless of doping—an exclusive from the October issue of Bicycling magazine.

Like many cycling fans, when I heard in June that the United States Anti-Doping Agency would be charging Lance Armstrong and five of his associates with a list of offenses that includes drug trafficking, use, and administration, from 1998 all the way through 2010, my first thought was, “Here we go again.”

I didn’t wonder if I would finally find out if Armstrong had doped—though I do wonder if there is any cyclist left on earth who doesn’t understand the decision has long been rendered. The judgment of Lance Armstrong was not rendered during the SCA arbitration in 2004, when the guaranteer of a contracted $5 million bonus for winning the Tour sought to prove that because he doped he should forfeit the money, nor did it come during the federal investigation that was closed without charges this past February, nor will it arise from USADA. The trial of Armstrong has been held in public and by the public since he first faced questions about cheating during the 1999 Tour, and at some point between then and now society delivered its maddening outcome: The jury is hung.

You believe or you don’t, and anything USADA says or decides will change that for few.

Through nearly two decades of various degrees of intensity and proximity as a fan, chronicler, antagonist, and friend of Armstrong, I granted him at times my full belief and at other times at least the possibility that he had raced clean; in 2011, I became convinced beyond any doubt that he had doped. I said so in this magazine more than a year ago, and detailed why, to much clamor and at least one public hope that I would burn in hell. Inciting nearly as much vitriol from his critics, I also said and still believe he was the greatest Tour de France champion of my era, a skilled bike racer with insane focus and a genetic gift that revealed itself when he was still in his teens, and that ­generations from now he will be revered as one of cycling’s complex but astounding legends.

The jousting and revelations that have followed seem pointless to me. Who—on either side of Armstrong’s innocence—still needs more proof to ­justify their belief? What misdeed could be nefarious enough to sicken those who still support him? What punishment or fate, short of a tear-drenched confession that Armstrong will never give, could be dire enough to satisfy his persecutors?­ But it wasn’t until USADA announced its intention to charge Armstrong that I fully comprehended just how pointless it all has become—and that, curiously, this utter pointlessness creates a most ­concrete fact: There is no justice to be had.

Some confusing aspects are open to fair debate, such as the idea that his downfall is central to a cleaner sport. Or that he is the subject of a witch hunt not only because he doped, like so many others who did and are left in at least relative peace, but because of his high profile and because he made bitter enemies (“Just so mean,” one of his most fervent critics said to me). Or if the courtroom chaos—which pitted USADA against the UCI and included a judge so dismissive of an Armstrong filing as to sound insulted—is desperation or just another manifestation of Armstrong’s win-at-all-costs nature. (Or both.) But there are, also, simple questions that lead to nowhere but lunacy, that have no legitimate or sane answer.

For instance, there’s this: What would happen to the jerseys?

If a guilty verdict were taken to its most logical endpoint, Armstrong would be stripped of all seven of the yellow jerseys that are the iconic proof of victory in the Tour de France, that emanate a cultural resonance so powerful and pervasive, and so emblematic of what he had accomplished (and perhaps even of who he was) that he appropriated the color in the branding of himself and his cancer awareness charity, Livestrong. Without those jerseys, he could not have become the world’s most visible advocate in the fight against cancer, nor would he ever have hung out with Matthew McConaughey or made out with Ashley Olsen—or, ­arguably, become a target of USADA. (None of the non-Tour-winning American teammates who doped with him were ever named as prime ­subjects of an investigation in the absence of a positive test for banned substances.)

What would happen to the jerseys would be an absurdity.

Probably the most notable outcome is that Jan Ullrich becomes a unique champion, a four-time winner of the Tour, more decorated than Greg LeMond. Ullrich is, of course, an admitted and convicted doper. The farce on top of this farce would be the continued possession of a yellow jersey by Bjarne Riis. After the 1996 Tour winner admitted in 2007 that he’d used EPO to achieve his victory, the race organizers told him not to attend that year’s edition, and in the official listing of winners in the online archive and elsewhere, a blank space ­appeared where his name once was. The next year, he was back at the Tour as a directeur sportif, and his name was back on the list.

If Armstrong is found by USADA to have doped but, like Riis, somehow is granted possession of his bounty, thanks to his celebrity a Hadron Collider-worthy impact will occur between our society’s ideal of morality and the real-life ethical relativism of cycling (and just about every other pursuit in life involving money and fame). It’s a black hole—one that already swallowed Floyd Landis and Alberto Contador, who doped and, unlike Riis, lost their jerseys.

The worst outcome of all will occur if the ­temporary blank space tried out on Riis is made permanent on Armstrong, the Tours from 1999 to 2005 awarded to no one, the essence of racing—that there is a winner—disastrously removed, as if doctors went in for a ruptured appendix and came out with the heart.

These unanswerable questions don’t stop with the jersey. Nor do they fall just to the fans.

Travis Tygart, the head of USADA, has said that one important purpose of his organization is to find and expose the truth, and he responded to Wisconsin congressman James Sensenbrenner’s criticism of the Armstrong investigation by saying, in part, that clean athletes “rightly depend upon USADA to ensure that no matter how ­famous or anonymous, we will treat each alleged offender the same.”

To his credit, Tygart doesn’t air details of ongoing cases in public, let alone discuss the nuances of his personal response to moral issues that arise when building those cases. But we can guess that at some moment he must have asked himself hard questions about the scruples of gaining testimony against Armstrong by not only granting immunity or delayed sentencing to admitted dopers—a standard tradeoff in legal proceedings our society seems comfortable with—but by the unquestionably ickier allowance that some of them could go ahead and participate in this year’s Tour de France. As first published by the Dutch newspaper Telesport in July and widely reported elsewhere, five of the witnesses in the Armstrong case are alleged to be the riders George Hincapie, Levi Leipheimer, Christian Vande Velde, and ­David Zabriskie, and one team director, Jonathan Vaughters.

Oddly, or at least it seems so to me, and perhaps only because the focus falls more on the human than the heroic, it is not with the yellow jerseys but with George Hincapie that my own questions about morality result in what feels like an unredeemably damning paradox.

My reporting on the witness list, which included independent verification by sources close to the investigation and by another witness not named by Telesport, indicates that Hincapie is indeed one of those who gave testimony that he witnessed and participated in doping. (Approached for comment by Bicycling, both Hincapie and his team, BMC, declined to speak.) Was it right for him to ride the Tour? I believe with all my heart, with all my love of cycling, that the answer is no. And yes.

This year’s Tour was a record-­setting 17th for George, the last before his ­already announced retirement. It was also a record for finishing—16 consecutive—a distinction he holds as well ­for Paris-Roubaix and the Tour of Flanders­ (both at 17). He rode as a super­domestique on nine Tour—winning teams (seven with Armstrong, one with Contador, and one with Cadel Evans), went to five Olympics, won a stage of the Tour, wore yellow for a day, and won a one-day Classic, Gent-Wevelgem.

In Riis’s autobiography, Stages of Light and Dark, and in numerous public speeches and comments, Riis has matter-of-factly characterized doping as a part of the profession during his racing years and, in an August interview with CycleSport, he called doping “the circumstance of the business” for the time. I have always thought that Hincapie handled the necessary ambiguities of that era, so succinctly and honestly laid out by Riis, with as much dignity as anyone participating in it could have, with an old-school class that accepted the reality of what it took to be successful but neither glorified it nor made a big show of denying it. He, if anyone of our generation, deserved that last Tour. But by what version of legal justice should this be allowed?

To be clear, in asking these questions I am not hinting that USADA should cease its prosecution or that there never should have been an investigation.

I am just pointing out that a legal verdict, which once seemed to everyone like the best shot we’d ever get for justice—and closure—will be instead a bewildering exercise in navigating the incomprehensible mores of modern sport, a labyrinth we have no map for, and that grows more complex each season. By some indications, from results of the biological passport system to the downward trends in watts-per-kilogram and climbing times, the sport was becoming cleaner before USADA prosecuted Armstrong—but it will never be entirely pure because human nature never will be. The postmodern hope we have come to, as I first heard voiced by Vaughters, is that cycling might stay clean enough to give dope-free racers a chance to win. You know: Just like the old days. Except in the future, genetic doping or nano-robots or cellular prosthetics or worse will cause cycling fans to regard our era as quaint, the way we think of la bomba—a vial of amphetamine, caffeine, and other substances handed up to ­riders in the last kilometers of a race in the time of Fausto Coppi. “Remember,” those future fans will say as they agonize over the subbing in of a clone during a rest day, “when all they did was transfuse their own blood and inject medicine that let them carry more oxygen? Remember when the 100-­percent ­human Lance Armstrong won seven Tours?”

What happens to the jerseys? You tell me. Someone tell me. Anyone tell all of us.